It is suggested that inference-time harness design is an important complement to conventional training-time distillation, enabling strong models to transfer cognitive structure to weaker models without retraining.
Cheng Qian, Wenting Zhao, Liangwei Yang et al.· 1 citation
Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding. Existing explainability efforts rely on textual rationales or sparse bounding boxes, which struggle to capture complex video dynamics such as occlusions and non-rigid deformations. We propose Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering (E-VQA), a novel task requiring models to jointly output a semantic answer and precise spatio-temporal evidence: temporal segments and dense, tracked object segmentation masklets. To support this, we introduce ST-Evidence, the first human-verified benchmark for both discriminative and generative pixel-level grounding. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models reveal a critical decoupling between QA accuracy and true visual perception that scaling alone fails to bridge. To address this, we develop scalable, automated generation pipelines to create ST-Evidence-Instruct, a 160k-scale dataset bridging high-level reasoning with fine-grained grounding. Fine-tuning grounded Video LLMs on this data yields substantial gains over the corresponding size-matched UniPixel baselines (e.g., +27.2 t-mean and +13.8 J&F on a 7B model), establishing a robust baseline for explainable, evidence-backed video understanding. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/EVQA.
Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang et al.· 0 citations
DarwinX is introduced, which treats self-evolution as selection over a population of harnesses with the model frozen: a preserve-and-extend contract admits only variants that extend coverage without regressing, an archive keeps alternative lineages for recombination, and failure-, teacher-, and self-derived evidence share one edit interface.
Yifang Zhang, Yutong Dai, Juntao Tan et al.· 1 citation
The LZ penalty is introduced, a penalty specialized for reducing degenerate repetitions in autoregressive language models without loss of capability and without instances of degenerate repetition, and enables state-of-the-art open-source reasoning models to operate with greedy decoding without loss of capability and without instances of degenerate repetition.
Antonio A. Ginart, Naveen Kodali, Jason Lee et al.· 0 citations